No new taxes? Not so fast

Mitch Daniels is not a communist, a socialist, or even a garden-variety liberal. On the contrary, he’s a conservative Republican who’s served at the pleasure of two Republican presidents (Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush) and now occupies the Indiana governor’s mansion. He’s even seen in some GOP circles as a potential 2012 presidential nominee. And yet when I asked Daniels earlier this month whether the federal government might have to raise taxes at some point in the future—regardless of which party was in power—his answer was yes.

“At some stage there could well be a tax increase,” he said. “If you believe our fiscal mess is republic-threatening, and if you have to take the third- or fourth-best approach, at the end of the day, I’d do it.”

Welcome to Grover Norquist’s worst nightmare. For the last 20 years, no one principle has united the Republican Party quite like its violent opposition to tax increases—except, perhaps, its equally ardent obsession with tax cuts. When liberal economist Paul Krugman described the GOP as a horde of “tax-cut zombies” just “shambling forward, always hungry for more,” he wasn’t far off; every election cycle, Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform forces candidates to sign a “no new tax” pledge, and holdouts risk being publicly ridiculed for not signing. But now there are indications that at least some Republicans, like Daniels, are awakening from their stupor. As the crippling recession and mounting long-term deficit projections inspire new calls for fiscal austerity, especially from the Tea Party types currently driving the GOP’s agenda, it’s worth asking whether we’re about to witness the biggest change in conservative politics since the rise of Reagan: the beginning of the end of the Tax Zombie Republican.

To get a sense of how such a staggering shift could be possible, let’s rev up our DeLoreans, restart our flux capacitors, and return to the roots of modern-day Republicanism. Among conservatives, Ronald Reagan is remembered as the tax-cutter in chief: the supply-side hero whose Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 slashed the top marginal tax rate by more than half. But the truth is that after his first year in office, Reagan was actually willing (if not always happy) to compensate for gaps in the government’s revenue stream by raising rates. In 1982, for example, he agreed to restore a third of the previous year’s massive cut. It was the largest tax increase in U.S. history. The Gipper also raised taxes in 1983. And 1984. And 1986. The party sainted him for his efforts.

That permissiveness ended with Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush. While campaigning for president in 1988, Bush made a solemn promise: “no new taxes.” But in 1991 he accepted a small tax hike as part of a major deficit-reduction package. Conservatives—who’d become militantly, monolithically antitax in the Gipper’s wake—were enraged. Never mind that the package paved the way for the booming economy and balanced budgets of the 1990s, much as Reagan’s apostasies coexisted peacefully with the steady growth of the previous decade. Bush lost the right, and then reelection. Ever since, only the rarest of Republicans has dared to deviate from GOP dogma on taxes—even as the party’s absolutism (see: Bush, George W.) spawned record deficits and squandered its reputation for fiscal responsibility.

Read the rest here.

Russia: Opposition to legal abortion rises sharply

MOSCOW, August 23, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The number of Russians who support either a full or partial ban on abortion has doubled in the past twelve years, according to a recent poll.

The independent, non-governmental polling and sociological research agency, Levada Analytical Center, reported that a recent survey of 1,600 Russians found 41 percent of those polled support introducing nationwide restrictions on abortion.

The number of those in favor of a complete ban on abortions has grown from 8 percent in 1998 to 16 percent in 2010, the report said.

Another 25 percent only approved of therapeutic, non-elective abortions, up from 13 percent earlier.

Forty-eight percent disapprove of a ban, down from 59 percent, while 11 percent were undecided, compared with 20 percent earlier.

Current law in the Russian Federation allows abortion on demand up to 12 weeks gestation, up to 22 weeks for social reasons, and at any point during the pregnancy for “medical necessity” and upon the woman’s consent, and is offered free of charge at all state clinics.

Russian Health Ministry figures show 1.2 million abortions last year compared to 1.7 million live births, with upwards of a quarter million women per year left infertile from abortion complications.

A leader in the Russian Orthodox Church said in June this year that Russia must enact pro-life laws or face demographic collapse.

Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin told Interfax news agency, "In Soviet times we got used to abortion and we got used to considering it an unavoidable part of our legal reality and that there is no way to the turn back the page. But we see today that it is possible to turn back a great deal.”

Between 1992 and 2008, Russia’s population dropped by more than 12 million.

Source

An update on the Lutheran - Orthodox discussion

...over at Gottesdienst Online. The discussion has gotten fairly deep with lots of comments. Perry Robinson (Acolyte4236) has been responding, at great length, to the various Lutheran reservations. For those interested in a rather serious discussion I would encourage you to follow the link.

Disclaimer: I read all of the comments that were posted as of last night and wound up with glazed eyes and a mild headache. I dabble in theology, but Perry (as Chris Jones noted fairly early in the discussion) is a heavyweight who is way out of my league. Why he is not teaching at St. Vlads or somewhere comparable is beyond me. It does strike me as a waste of talent though.

P.S. Perry's own blog Energetic Processions is linked in the sidebar. It is the most serious Orthodox blog with theology as its focus that I am aware of. Though again, we are not talking Orthodoxy 101.

A miracle (sort of)

OK it's not on the same level as the parting of the Red Sea. But still it's impressive. Recall in my previous post I was mourning my ten year old (I'm not kidding) cell phone. This poor phone has endured more abuse in ten years than almost any modern electronic device, and yet it never died. I have kicked it, stepped on it, sat on it (multiple times) and dropped it more times than I can count. But like the rabbit in the battery commercial, it just kept going and going and going, battered but functional. It was so abused and resilient that I have refused to part with it despite the fact that I could easily have upgraded to a newer phone any time. Another reason I chose not to upgrade is because of the fragility of most newer phones where if you look at them wrong or speak too loudly into them, they break.

Then came yesterday. It was in the middle 90's and I was a tad on the warm side. So I decided to cool off with a nice relaxing swim. Off I went to the pool with keys, towel and phone which when fumbling everything in my hands, I decided to stuff into the pocket of my swim trunks. So I get to the pool, deposit the keys and towel on the lounge chair, walk to the edge of the pool and dive in.

AHHHH... it felt so good and pleasantly refreshing. I started swimming some laps and had been for at it for no more than 5 minutes when I suddenly felt a distinct vibration against my right leg that was alarmingly familiar...

OH NO!!!

This being a Christian blog, I will refrain from directly quoting what came out of my mouth next as I broke the olympic speed record in reaching the edge of the pool and pulled myself out. Quickly I whipped out my phone just in time to see the words "Good Bye" fading from its external screen (already cracked from being dropped). Frantically I hit the power button.

Nothing.

I started to shake the phone. Water came out of the hole used for head phones. I looked at the interior screen and could see water sloshing around and a sort of crystal white out forming on the screen. It rapidly expanded until it completely blotted the screen.

This I realized was very likely the end.

I removed the battery, opened the phone up and set it down in the blistering sun. Resigned that there was nothing more I could do, I went back into the pool, no longer enjoying it, and finished swimming laps for another twenty minutes or so. Then I gathered everything up and went home. I put the open phone on the ledge of the fence where it would get as much sun as possible in the rather dim hope it would dry out. After which I started considering what I would get for a replacement.

Fast forward to today. Late afternoon rolls around and I decide to try charging the battery by itself. To my surprise it seemed to take the charge. Then I went to took at my phone on the fence ledge. The screen was a giant sheet of white water crystal.

Sigh.

I start banging the phone in my hand and I can feel water dribbling out of cracks and some of the water crystals start to fade a bit. After a bit more banging I decided that it was time to get it over with, grabbed the battery, popped it in and hit the power button. And then...

IT WORKED!

The power came on and I could see the interior screen, albeit slightly obscured by water. The outside screen also illuminated, but nothing showed up. No welcome or time. So I tried checking my phone lists on the inside screen. They showed up. Then I called a friend. And the call went through. Still a blank on the outside screen. But the phone is functional. OK. So I am gonna have to buy a watch to tell time. Big deal. Unbelievably this, the most abused phone in N. America, has yet again survived.

When I die I am willing it to the Smithsonian.

An observation

My cell phone does not enjoy swimming as much as I do.

(Until further notice if anyone needs to get hold of me please use email. On a side note, I'm not sure what to put for a tag on this post. Stupidity and Moron come to mind though.)

I knew we were missing something...

A new Lutheran denomination. Please welcome the North American Lutheran Church (NALC) which will join the ELCA, LCMC, LCMS, and the WELS in America's Lutheran universe. At least the Lutheran alphabet soup has some rational behind it. The name Lutheran notwithstanding, they all have serious doctrinal differences.

So what's our excuse again?

Memory Eternal: Metropolitan Christopher

Met. +Christopher of the Serbian Orthodox Church (Midwestern America) has reposed after a long illness. See Fr. Milovan's blog Again and Again for details and funeral arrangements.

May his memory be eternal!

Disturbing news from Damascus

Via Owen and Samn! comes the report that all of the bishops of the AOANA are to again be demoted to auxiliary bishops. See the linked sites for the details.

R.I.P. The McMansion

They’ve been called McMansions, Starter Castles, Garage Mahals and Faux Chateaus but here’s the latest thing you can call them — History.

In the past few years, there have been an increasing number of references made to the “McMansion glut” and the “McMansion backlash,” as more towns pass ordinances against garishly large homes, which are generally over 3,000 square feet and built very close together.

What sets a McMansion apart from a regular mansion, according to Wikipedia, are a few characteristics: They’re tacky, they lack a definitive style and they have a “displeasingly jumbled appearance.”

Well, count 2010 as the year the last nail was hammered into the McCoffin: In its latest report on home-buying trends, real-estate site Trulia declares: “The McMansion Era Is Over.”

Just 9 percent of the people surveyed by Trulia said their ideal home size was over 3,200 square feet. Meanwhile, more than one-third said their ideal size was under 2,000 feet.

“That’s something that would’ve been unbelievable just a few years back,” said Pete Flint, CEO and co-founder of Trulia. “Americans are moving away from McMansions.”

Read the rest here.

Lutheranism and Orthodoxy

Burnell F Eckardt Jr. discusses the temptations of Orthodoxy and his objections to it.

H/T Dr. Tighe

This is just wrong...

In 1969, John Wayne played Rooster Cogburn in "True Grit" -- a grizzled, drunken U.S. Marshal hired by a 14-year-old girl to track down her father's killer. The role ended up winning the aging Western star his first and only Oscar, prompting him to make a rare sequel -- "Rooster Cogburn" -- opposite Katherine Hepburn in 1975. The image of Wayne's craggy, eye-patched visage from "True Grit" has become a cinematic icon.

So film mavens everywhere were taken aback when it was announced last year that Joel and Ethan Coen would been making their own version of "True Grit." But don't expect a straight remake; this movie is based more closely on the Charles Portis novel. And Jeff Bridges, fresh off his Oscar win, was tapped to play Cogburn; that's right, the Duke has been replaced by the Dude.

Read the rest here.

Britain's David Cameron seeks smaller government, more citizen involvement

LONDON -- The Obama administration might be reasserting the government's place in American life. But on this side of the Atlantic, the so-called Big Society vision of Britain's new Conservative prime minister is of a nation with minimal state interference.

David Cameron's 100-day-old ruling coalition is launching an effort to reduce the role of government, seeking to vest communities and individuals with fresh powers and peddling a new era of volunteerism to replace the state in running museums, parks and other public facilities. Supporters and opponents describe the campaign as the biggest assault on government here since the wave of privatizations by Conservative firebrand Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.

The idea, one with distant echoes of the "tea party" movement in the United States, is to pluck decision making out of the hands of bureaucrats. Groups of like-minded parents and teachers, for instance, are being invited to open their own taxpayer-funded schools. The groups -- not government school boards -- will be able to determine the curriculum at these "free schools," using their own discretion to make some subjects compulsory while omitting others they find objectionable or unnecessary, such as lessons on multiculturalism.

But the government's push is also about pinching pennies in an age of austerity in Britain, which, like many nations including the United States, is heavily indebted and increasingly broke. Through the toughest budget cuts in generations, the new coalition is moving quickly to shrink the size of the state, with some estimates indicating as many as 600,000 public-sector job losses -- or one in 10 -- by 2015. At the same time, Cameron is backing legislation that would allow communities to take over, for instance, post office branches, staffing them with volunteers instead of paid workers.

"The Big Society is about a huge culture change, where people, in their everyday lives, in their homes, in their neighborhoods, in their workplace, don't always turn to officials, local authorities or central government for answers to the problems they face," Cameron said last month in a keynote speech on the issue.

In what it calls a "radical extension of direct democracy," the new government is moving to give citizens the right to veto property-tax increases above certain limits. In an effort to hold the public sector more accountable, it is also pressing forward with plans to have communities directly elect police commissioners while forcing the publication of more-detailed crime statistics to give residents a better picture of how local forces are doing.

The new coalition of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats is set to present legislation to dissolve the government health boards that once determined needs at public hospitals, which would allow doctors to become the ultimate deciders.

Cameron's critics say the proposed cuts risk fueling more unemployment and triggering another recession. And public outrage has already forced the government to backpedal on some attempts to trim public spending, including a plan to scrap a government-funded free milk program for needy children under 5.

Read the rest here.

A 1930's mystery in 2010

LOS ANGELES — Two infant skeletons wrapped in 1930s newspapers and placed in doctor's bags were found inside an unclaimed steamer trunk by a woman cleaning out the basement of a 1924 building that's being converted to condominiums, authorities said.

The skeletons, believed to be decades-old remains of fetuses or infants, were discovered late Tuesday in the 4-foot (1.2-meter) -tall green trunk inscribed with the initials JMB.

Other things found in the trunk included cigarettes, a green bowl, black and white photos, letters, a book club membership certificate inscribed Jean M. Barrie and ticket stubs from the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games.

The remains were found in the four-story brick building near MacArthur Park, just a few miles west of downtown Los Angeles. The larger skeleton, the size of a newborn, was wrapped in a Los Angeles Times newspaper dated 1934.

A smaller skeleton was wrapped in newspaper dated 1932, said Gloria Gomez, property manager of the co-op for the last 10 years. She and friend Yiming Xing, 35, who has lived there for six years, had to force open the trunk with a screwdriver, she said.

Coroner's officials will try to determine how the babies died, check missing children reports and try to find relatives and neighbors who might know what happened.

It was Gomez's job to clean out the basement. Everyone in the building was given until Aug. 14 to get their things out. The condo board told Gomez she could have anything that wasn't claimed.

Read the rest here.

Just me playing detective, but my first guess, is that this may be the aftermath of a couple of abortions, which were highly illegal in those days.

Last US combat forces are leaving Iraq

But a very large body of "military advisers" is remaining.

NEAR THE IRAQ-KUWAIT BORDER — The last U.S. combat troops were crossing the border into Kuwait on Thursday morning, bringing to a close the active combat phase of a 7½-year war that overthrew the dictatorial regime of Saddam Hussein, forever defined the presidency of George W. Bush and left more than 4,400 American service members and tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.

The final convoy of the Army’s 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, based at Fort Lewis, Wash., was about to enter Kuwait shortly after 1:30 a.m. (6:30 p.m. Wednesday ET), carrying the last of the 14,000 U.S. combat forces in Iraq, said NBC’s Richard Engel, who has been traveling with the brigade as it moved out this week.

Read he rest here.

Feds accuse New Jersey of fraud (state bonds)

Federal regulators accused the State of New Jersey of securities fraud on Wednesday for claiming it was properly funding public workers’ pensions when it was not.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said the action was its first ever against a state, and only its second against any government over the handling of a public pension fund. The city of San Diego was the first.

The S.E.C. settled its civil complaint with New Jersey by issuing a cease-and-desist order, which the state accepted without admitting or denying the findings.

The agency did not impose a financial penalty. The S.E.C.’s powers of enforcement against the states are tightly limited by states’-rights concerns and constitutional law, and it has standing to get involved only when there is a clear-cut case of fraud.

Nor did the S.E.C.’s order name the bond underwriters whose job it was to vouch for the state’s financial statements. That raised the possibility that investors might decide to file suit.

The action could also put pressure on other states and cities that have used various accounting maneuvers to portray their pension funds as healthier than they currently are. Actuaries have been raising questions, for example, about the plans Illinois has laid out for strengthening its pension funds.

The S.E.C. said in its cease-and-desist order that investors bought more than $26 billion worth of New Jersey’s bonds, without understanding the severity of the state’s financial troubles.

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

"The corporate donation has no impact on the reporting activities of our newsgathering organizations. There is a strict wall between business and editorial and the corporate office does not consult with our newsgathering organizations ... before making donations."

-Spokesman Jack Horner commenting on News Corp's decision to donate $1 million to the Republican Party. Rupert Murdoch is the principal owner of News Corp which is the parent company of FOX News.

Source

Sad news

John T. Steinbock, the Roman Catholic bishop of Fresno, has been diagnosed with lung cancer. Just how advanced is not yet known. But lung cancer is a really bad diagnosis under any circumstances. Bp. +Steinbock has been very kind and charitable to the mission parish that I belong to in Merced. He has given his blessing for us to use the beautiful (pre Vatican II) chapel at the old Mercy Hospital building for many years now. In your charity please pray for him.

News Source

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard: Time is running out for the West

"Genuinely adverse debt dynamics were only expected to materialise in 15 to 20 years. The crisis has 'fast-forwarded' history, eroding all the time available to adjust, " said the group's quarterly Sovereign Monitor.

Moody's fears that the US will crash through its safety buffer by 2013 if growth falters (adverse scenario), with interest payments topping 14pc of tax revenues. The debt-to-revenue ratio has already doubled in three years to 430pc.

The US, UK, Germany, France, and Spain are all at risk of an "interest rate shock", either because they must roll over a cluster of short-term debt (US, France, Spain) or because deficits are so large.

Countries that "fail to demonstrate the level of social cohesion required to stabilise debt" will lose their AAA rating. "Intra-generational" conflict between young and old requires careful handling. States that delay pension reform risk spiralling downwards.

Moody's said the world had changed since Europe's debt crisis. None of the large sovereign states can still assume it is credit-worthy. "The burden of proof now falls on governments," it added.

Britain has the safety cushion of long debt maturities, but the structural deficit is causing debt "to grow an unsustainable rate": the UK is clearly one of the weaker countries in the AAA peer group.

Moody's expects Britain's public debt to reach 90pc of GDP within three years. It warned that any slackening in fiscal tightening by the Government squeeze would lead to a "sharp rise" in funding costs if growth also slowed, with a nasty effect on debt dynamics.

The warning appears to vindicate the Coalition's claim that immediate belt-tightening is needed to restore confidence and head off a gilts crisis where markets would impose harsher measures.

The current crisis differs starkly from the "one-off" debt spikes after the Second World War, when young economies were able to outgrow the debt burden. This time the threat lies ahead as the aging crisis drives up pension and health costs on a static tax base. "While the current stock of debt is large, it is dwarfed by the accumulation of future liabilities if policies do not change."

Source

None dare call it tyranny

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Read the rest here.
H/T The Young Fogey

The first half or so of the linked post is pretty good and I generally agree with its complaints. The second part seems divorced from reality to me. Reasonable people can disagree with the war in Iraq. I have come around 180 degrees on that subject myself. It was a war of choice against a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Afghanistan is a different matter altogether. Sometimes I think people need to be reminded that THEY CAME HERE AND ATTACKED US ON OUR SOIL. Sorry but no one gets a free pass on that.

Afghanistan in 2001 had become the Walt Disney World of terrorism. It was being used, with the full and active support of the de-facto government, as the main base for the world's most lethal terrorist organization. An organization dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the establishment of Sharia worldwide. If you allow your country to be used as the launch pad for an attack on another country and provide material support for those carrying out the attack, that is customarily regarded as a casus belli.

Yes civilians have been killed during the war. And that is deeply regrettable. But there is an important distinction between us and those we are fighting there. We make every effort, often at the expense of our own military interests and even to the point of endangering our people, to avoid civilian casualties. The other side uses civilians as human shields and deliberately targets them as a matter of policy.

I think the author needs to climb down from his high horse and take a good stiff drink of reality.

As for Iran I have no clue where he is getting his information from. He claims our own intelligence says three is no nuclear weapons program. If so I missed that. Every report I have seen flatly states the exact opposite. Even Russia is now reluctantly turning on their long time business partner.

Still if Iran does go over the top and Israel decides it's not inclined to wait and see how nutty Iran's dictator is, that's their business. As for us, I see almost no chance we will become involved in another war. I have little use for Obama, but he is I think coming to terms with an unpleasant reality. We are broke and wars cost money. He won't do anything that might endanger his precious domestic agenda.

What's more is I suspect that his military people have told him the same thing they told George Bush. Iran is not a military midgit. And they posess the ability to inflict a cripling blow without ever using nukes. They control the land on the eastern side of the Straits of Hormuz. That means that they can very easily shut down the flow of about half of the world's oil supply and short of a full scale invasion there is damned little we could do about it.

The simple truth is that we have no real military option for dealing with Iran. And unfortunately, they know it.

Champion Athletes in Birmingham (in 1902)

An astonishingly high quality film of an athletic competition and the crowds from Birmingham England in July of 1902.

(Spoiler Alert: The Americans dominate.)

Why does a new mosque take precedence over an already existing church?

Rebuild St. Nicholas First!

Read the story here.

Note: The original image used in this post has been replaced by the two above.

Quote of the day...

From a comment at T-19...

How I wish that our diocese had this sae kind of spine to think through the implications of Neff Powell being our bishop and the President of Planned Parenthood, and lifting his hand to bless an abortion clinic in Virginia.

Source

Zsa Zsa Gabor asks for last rites

SAN FRANCISCO — Actress Zsa Zsa Gabor, a fixture in Hollywood for six decades, asked that a priest read her the last rites on Sunday, following hospitalization two days earlier due to complications from hip surgery.

The 93-year-old Gabor, whose string of movies, television shows and wealthy husbands dates to the 1950s, was visited by a priest at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, her husband Frederick Prinz von Anhalt, told Reuters.

Gabor was able to speak "very little," though she was conscious, he said.

Gabor was admitted on Friday to the hospital to treat two blood clots, only two days after being released for hip replacement surgery. Gabor broke her hip on July 17 when she fell out of bed while watching the television game show "Jeopardy," said her publicist John Blanchette.

"Her health has been up and down ever since," he said.

The Hungarian-born Gabor has appeared in more than 30 movies, and her penchant for calling everyone "dah-ling" in her Hungarian accent made her a well-known Hollywood personality.

She, along with her two glamorous sisters Eva and Magda made several appearances on radio and television shows in the 1950s in the 1950s and 1960s. Zsa Zsa's first starring role in the movies was in "Moulin Rouge," followed by "Lili" and later "Touch of Evil."

Married nine times to a string of husbands that included a Turkish diplomat and the hotel magnate Conrad Hilton, Gabor celebrated her 24th wedding anniversary to Von Anhalt in the hospital on Saturday, said Blanchette.

Source.

For the dead in New York there is (almost) No Vacancy

THOSE of us among the living all know New York City can be maddeningly expensive, whether one is shopping for a $40 million mansion on Fifth Avenue or a $2,500 studio walk-up in a former tenement on the Lower East Side.

For the dead, however, virtually no amount of money will secure a final resting place in the heart of a city that is fast running out of graveyard space.

And in the parts of town where a burial plot is still available, the cost has in some cases more than tripled in less than a decade; aboveground mausoleums can fetch upward of $3 million. Cemeteries are scrambling to create more space, and as plot prices have soared, the number of cremations has also risen, with a quarter of New Yorkers choosing the less expensive alternative.

Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights, the last operating graveyard in Manhattan, has stopped selling plots, offering burial only in the most “extraordinary circumstances,” or to people with long-held reservations.

The largest Jewish graveyard in Brooklyn, Washington Cemetery, ran out of land in the winter after tearing up roads and pathways to utilize every cubic inch of ground. Evergreens and Cypress Hills, also in Brooklyn, may sprawl, but not enough, and dozens of smaller cemeteries spread across the five boroughs are squeezed, too. The city’s largest Catholic cemetery, Calvary in Queens, is close to capacity. And even the most famous of them all, Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, has only about five more years before it will be forced to stop selling plots.

Read the rest here.

Generation Exile: Russia's new wave of expatriots fleeing official corruption

Yevgeny Chichvarkin once took London by storm. Bounding onto the stage at the Russian Economic Forum four years ago in red sneakers, graffiti-sprayed jeans, and a top that proclaimed that he was MADE IN MOSCOW, the 34-year-old Russian businessman told the elite gathering how he’d grown his Evroset mobile-phone company into a billion-dollar empire in just five years, and that a “new generation of young businesspeople” was “ready to integrate Russia into the world economy.”

Now Chichvarkin is back in London, no longer a poster boy for Russian investment but instead a fugitive. Two of his business partners are in jail, his company has been sold off after a series of raids by Russian police, and his mother died under mysterious circumstances in April. Chichvarkin himself is wanted on charges of kidnapping and extortion, which he insists were cooked up by a gang of “werewolves in uniform”—bureaucrats and police who use the law to shake down and steal businesses.

Chichvarkin has joined Russia’s Generation Exile, a tide of businessmen, lawyers, accountants, and bankers who have fled their country after being robbed and threatened by Russia’s corrupt law-enforcement officials. Transparency International, an NGO, estimates that fully one third of Russian businesses have been targeted in attempted corporate raids by police. An anti-raider hotline set up by the Moscow city hall reported a 10-fold jump in complaints, from 200 to more than 2,000, over the last year. And while it is hard to calculate exactly how many of the estimated 300,000 Russians living in London are the victims or beneficiaries of police-backed shakedowns, the number of business exiles afraid to return to their homeland for fear of arrest is certainly in the thousands. According to a survey last year by the Moscow-based Levada Center, many more may exit voluntarily: 13 percent of 1,600 respondents said they wanted to leave Russia, the same percentage as in 1992, a year after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Read the rest here.

The Dormition of our Most Holy Lady the Mother of God and Ever-Virgin Mary

The Dormition of our Most Holy Lady Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary: After the Ascension of the Lord, the Mother of God remained in the care of the Apostle John the Theologian, and during his journeys She lived at the home of his parents, near the Mount of Olives. She was a source of consolation and edification both for the Apostles and for all the believers. Conversing with them, She told them about miraculous events: the Annunciation, the seedless and undefiled Conception of Christ born of Her, about His early childhood, and about His earthly life. Like the Apostles, She helped plant and strengthen the Christian Church by Her presence, Her discourse and Her prayers.

The reverence of the Apostles for the Most Holy Virgin was extraordinary. After the receiving of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the Apostles remained at Jerusalem for about ten years attending to the salvation of the Jews, and wanting moreover to see the Mother of God and hear Her holy discourse. Many of the newly-enlightened in the Faith even came from faraway lands to Jerusalem, to see and to hear the All-Pure Mother of God.

During the persecution initiated by King Herod against the young Church of Christ (Acts 12:1-3), the Most Holy Virgin and the Apostle John the Theologian withdrew to Ephesus in the year 43. The preaching of the Gospel there had fallen by lot to the Apostle John the Theologian. The Mother of God was on Cyprus with St Lazarus the Four-Days-Dead, where he was bishop. She was also on Holy Mount Athos. St Stephen of the Holy Mountain says that the Mother of God prophetically spoke of it: "Let this place be my lot, given to me by my Son and my God. I will be the Patroness of this place and intercede with God for it."

The respect of ancient Christians for the Mother of God was so great that they preserved what they could about Her life, what they could take note of concerning Her sayings and deeds, and they even passed down to us a description of Her outward appearance.

According to Tradition, based on the words of the Hieromartyrs Dionysius the Areopagite (October 3), Ignatius the God-Bearer (December 20), St Ambrose of Milan (December 7) had occasion to write in his work "On Virgins" concerning the Mother of God: "She was a Virgin not only in body, but also in soul, humble of heart, circumspect in word, wise in mind, not overly given to speaking, a lover of reading and of work, and prudent in speech. Her rule of life was to offend no one, to intend good for everyone, to respect the aged, not envy others, avoid bragging, be healthy of mind, and to love virtue."

Read the rest here.

A blessed feast to all of you.

Warren Buffet warns of inflation, shortens duration of bond holdings

Aug. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Warren Buffett shortened the duration of bonds held by his Berkshire Hathaway Inc. after warning that deficit spending could force inflation higher.

Twenty-one percent of holdings including Treasuries, municipal debt, foreign-government securities and corporate bonds were due in one year or less as of June 30, Omaha, Nebraska-based Berkshire said in a filing Aug. 6. That compares with 18 percent on March 31, and 16 percent at the end of last year’s second quarter.

“It may be a sign that Buffett expects interest rates to start rising, maybe sooner than the conventional wisdom,” Meyer Shields, an analyst in Baltimore at Stifel Nicolaus & Co. who has a “sell” rating on Berkshire, said in an interview.

Inflation has fallen to a 44-year low even as the Federal Reserve more than doubled its balance sheet in two years to $2.33 trillion to help draw the economy out of recession. A U.S. jobs report last week showing that companies hired fewer workers than forecast in July pushed the two-year Treasury yield to a record low. Bill Gross, founder of Pacific Investment Management Co., advised investors to buy longer-dated maturities.

Buffett, 79, urged Congress last year to guard against inflation as the U.S. economy returned to growth. In an August 2009 op-ed in the New York Times, the Berkshire chief executive officer said government must address the “monetary medicine” that was pumped into the financial system after the 2008 crisis.

“The United States is spewing a potentially damaging substance into our economy -- greenback emissions,” Buffett wrote. “Unchecked greenback emissions will certainly cause the purchasing power of currency to melt.”

Read the rest here.

Great Britain: Rising Inflation Threatens Savings

Historically low interest rates and the government’s preferred measure of inflation, the Consumer Prices Index, at 3.2 per cent means savers are already struggling to get an income.

There are currently no accounts available to higher rate taxpayers that provide a real rate of return after tax and inflation, and just a handful available to basic rate taxpayers. But even these could be nudged off the savings landscape, financial experts warned.

They suggested that if CPI rises to above 3.8 per cent, there will be no point any taxpayer using a savings account to produce an income.

In this situation, savers would actually end up losing money and could end up being more than £300 out of pocket in a year on a £10,000 investment.

Darren Cook, of personal finance website Moneyfacts, said: “If inflation rises to 3.8 per cent, all savings accounts will effectively be totally obsolete.

Read the rest here.

Repent or you're fired

MOSCOW, August 13, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The head of a large dairy company near Moscow has informed his 6000 workers that company policy will require all employees to closely follow the teachings and precepts of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Vasily Boiko-Veliki, director of Russkoe Moloko (Russian Milk), told Ekho Moskvy radio that the company was established to promote the Orthodox revival of Russia, and the rules were meant "to prevent future sins by employees."

"We have about 6,000 employees, most of whom are Orthodox, and I expect them to be faithful and to repent," Boiko-Veliki said.

Answering the question if he employs only Orthodox believers, Boiko-Veliki said, "There is no limitation, but baptized people mostly come, whose goals in life coincide with ours, the Orthodox transfiguration of Russia."

The new rules require all Orthodox Christian employees who are civilly married or living together to be married in Russian Orthodox Church ceremonies by October 14, the feast of the Protection (Pokrov) of the Mother of God, or face the possibility of dismissal.

Newly-hired Orthodox employees who had been married in civil ceremonies would be given three months to have a religious wedding.

Boiko-Veliki explained that those who are not baptized do not have to marry in the church, but all employees will be able to take an educational course on basic Orthodox culture.

The new rules also state that anyone procuring or counseling for abortion would face dismissal from work.

“Abortion is the murder of someone. We do not want to work with murderers,” Boiko-Veliki told Ekho Moskvy.

Vladimir Vigilyansky, head of the Russian Orthodox Church's Patriarchal press service, told the media that the Patriarchate was critical of Boiko-Veliki's methods of spiritual transfiguration at a private company, but noted that the church in Russia has undergone a marked revival since the collapse of Communism.

The Russian businessman commented on the prolonged heat wave and resultant forest fires that are plaguing the western part of the country, and said that a return to the practices of the faith, such as sacramental marriages, could improve things.

"This summer of abnormal heat and drought is a judgment upon Russia’s godless ways," Boiko-Veliki told Gazeta.ru. “Our prayers are probably too weak and there is no repentance in our hearts.”

Source

Sacrilege at Ground Zero

A place is made sacred by a widespread belief that it was visited by the miraculous or the transcendent (Lourdes, the Temple Mount), by the presence there once of great nobility and sacrifice (Gettysburg), or by the blood of martyrs and the indescribable suffering of the innocent (Auschwitz).

When we speak of Ground Zero as hallowed ground, what we mean is that it belongs to those who suffered and died there -- and that such ownership obliges us, the living, to preserve the dignity and memory of the place, never allowing it to be forgotten, trivialized or misappropriated.

That's why Disney's 1993 proposal to build an American history theme park near Manassas Battlefield was defeated by a broad coalition that feared vulgarization of the Civil War (and that was wiser than me; at the time I obtusely saw little harm in the venture). It's why the commercial viewing tower built right on the border of Gettysburg was taken down by the Park Service. It's why, while no one objects to Japanese cultural centers, the idea of putting one up at Pearl Harbor would be offensive.

And why Pope John Paul II ordered the Carmelite nuns to leave the convent they had established at Auschwitz. He was in no way devaluing their heartfelt mission to pray for the souls of the dead. He was teaching them a lesson in respect: This is not your place; it belongs to others. However pure your voice, better to let silence reign.

Even New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who denounced opponents of the proposed 15-story mosque and Islamic center near Ground Zero as tramplers on religious freedom, asked the mosque organizers "to show some special sensitivity to the situation." Yet, as columnist Rich Lowry pointedly noted, the government has no business telling churches how to conduct their business, shape their message or show "special sensitivity" to anyone about anything. Bloomberg was thereby inadvertently conceding the claim of those he excoriates for opposing the mosque, namely that Ground Zero is indeed unlike any other place and therefore unique criteria govern what can be done there.

Bloomberg's implication is clear: If the proposed mosque were controlled by "insensitive" Islamist radicals either excusing or celebrating 9/11, he would not support its construction.

But then, why not? By the mayor's own expansive view of religious freedom, by what right do we dictate the message of any mosque? Moreover, as a practical matter, there's no guarantee that this couldn't happen in the future. Religious institutions in this country are autonomous. Who is to say that the mosque won't one day hire an Anwar al-Aulaqi -- spiritual mentor to the Fort Hood shooter and the Christmas Day bomber, and onetime imam at the Virginia mosque attended by two of the 9/11 terrorists?

An Aulaqi preaching in Virginia is a security problem. An Aulaqi preaching at Ground Zero is a sacrilege. Or would the mayor then step in -- violating the same First Amendment he grandiosely pretends to protect from mosque opponents -- and exercise a veto over the mosque's clergy?

Location matters. Especially this location. Ground Zero is the site of the greatest mass murder in American history -- perpetrated by Muslims of a particular Islamist orthodoxy in whose cause they died and in whose name they killed.

Of course that strain represents only a minority of Muslims. Islam is no more intrinsically Islamist than present-day Germany is Nazi -- yet despite contemporary Germany's innocence, no German of goodwill would even think of proposing a German cultural center at, say, Treblinka.

Which makes you wonder about the goodwill behind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf's proposal. This is a man who has called U.S. policy "an accessory to the crime" of 9/11 and, when recently asked whether Hamas is a terrorist organization, replied, "I'm not a politician. . . . The issue of terrorism is a very complex question."

America is a free country where you can build whatever you want -- but not anywhere. That's why we have zoning laws. No liquor store near a school, no strip malls where they offend local sensibilities, and, if your house doesn't meet community architectural codes, you cannot build at all.

These restrictions are for reasons of aesthetics. Others are for more profound reasons of common decency and respect for the sacred. No commercial tower over Gettysburg, no convent at Auschwitz -- and no mosque at Ground Zero.

Build it anywhere but there.

The governor of New York offered to help find land to build the mosque elsewhere. A mosque really seeking to build bridges, Rauf's ostensible hope for the structure, would accept the offer.

-Charles Krauthammer
Source

I believe in religious freedom in this country, and that includes for Muslims. I don't think they should be told they can't build there. I DO think that they should be told, very frankly if necessary, that building a mosque at ground zero is insensitive (I really hate that term but it works in this case) and will be seen as offensive by many if not most Americans including me. There is a difference between "can" and "should." It is not our place to dictate. On the other hand we are perfectly within our rights to make it clear to someone or a group when they are behaving rudely or doing something that is in very bad taste.

Such is the case here.

Fed’s Hoenig: Rates Need to Rise

The U.S. economy is recovering and the Federal Reserve needs to raise interest rates, lest it leave in place a policy that will only fuel future financial imbalances, Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City President Thomas Hoenig said Friday.

“We need to get off of the emergency rate of zero, move rates up slowly and deliberately,” which will bring policy in better alignment “with the economy’s slow, deliberate recovery,” the official said. While the markets may like the current stance of monetary policy, Hoenig said “I wish free money was really free and that there was a painless way to move from severe recession and high leverage to robust and sustainable economic growth, but there is no short cut.”

Hoenig’s remarks — they came from the text of a speech to be delivered Friday before a meeting with the community in Lincoln, Neb. — came on the heels of his latest dissent against the consensus view of the Fed.

On Tuesday, the Fed decided to provide additional support to an economy whose recovery appears to be faltering, by deciding to maintain the size of its balance sheet, rather than letting it slowly shrink. The Fed will do this by reinvesting the proceeds of its vast mortgage holdings back into Treasurys.

The action is controversial. Its economic impact is uncertain and some felt the Fed took the step simply to show to markets they were willing to do something given the economy’s problems.

Hoenig has been a persistent critic of the Fed’s stance throughout his tenure this year as a voter on Federal Open Market Committee. He has fretted that the current stance of policy could give way to fresh financial imbalances. His confidence in the recovery has led him to advocate raising interest rates, as well.

Read the rest here.

H/T Brian (an old friend)

Orthodox Shrines in Kosovo fight for survival

Holy Trinity Church in Kosovo

Moscow fears that NATO's decision to transfer the protection of Serbian Orthodox shrines in Kosovo to the local police maystir up tensions in the region.

Spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, Andrey Nesterenko believes that this may lead to distrust of international peacekeepers. NATO made this decision without approval of the Serbian Orthodox Church and is breaching the1244 UN resolution.

The resolution was adopted in 1999 and states that Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia and its shrines should be protected by Serbia. The document is still valid, thus, it has to be followed.

Monasteries in Gracanica,Visoki Decani and Monastery of the Holy Archangels will be transferred to the police in late August. Many of them areon the UNESCO World Heritage list.

In 2004, 35 Orthodox shrines were vandalized and burnt down by Kosovo Albanians,while they saw no resistance from peacekeepers. Russians expert on Serbia Alexander Kravchenko believes that Kosovo military men are interested in controlling local Orthodox sites to make Serbian enclaves recognize the power of Kosovo government.

The goal of Kosovo Albanians is to make Serbs leave Kosovo. This decision is another way to push them put of the region. Now all Serbian monasteries are controlled by Kosovo-Albanian companies. They provide them with water, electricity, communal utilities. As this needs to be fixed in agreements it means recognizing Kosovo's state institutions.

The Serbian Orthodox Church believes NATO will revoke its decision, especially when many European countries are also concerned with the situation.

Source

Maxine Waters and the bank

As chairman and chief executive of OneUnited Bank, Kevin L. Cohee has sought to build a company that is about more than just money. He promoted the bank, now at the center of a House ethics case against Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), as a uniquely responsible investor in impoverished minority communities and urged prospective clients to live modestly.

Customers ought to focus on "real connections, real relationships," Cohee urges in a recording on the bank's Web site. Avoid "people who want to be with you based on the things that you have."

"Do you really need a Mercedes-Benz?" he asks. "Houses don't make you, cars don't make you."

Cohee, 52, took a somewhat different view in his own life. His bank purchased or leased luxury real estate he used and, until federal regulators complained in 2008, paid for his Porsche. Cohee's East Coast spread was an $880,000 condominium on Miami Beach's Ocean Drive, and out west the bank leased a $26,500-a-month mansion for him on Palisades Beach Road in Santa Monica, Calif., owned by Bruce Springsteen's drummer, Max Weinberg.

A battle of lawsuits over the house -- Cohee complained that he had to ship in "a huge bar, a desk, a chandelier," while Weinberg accused him of installing secret surveillance cameras in the master bedroom -- led Cohee and his wife, through a corporation they formed, to buy the house for $6.4 million in late 2006. OneUnited then provided him a living allowance at the mansion, where, a year later, he was twice arrested, on sexual assault and drug charges.

It was the bank's assistance with his expenses that helped provoke a cease-and-desist order from the federal government, accusing the bank and its officers of misspending and lax lending, and putting its operating license at risk.

That order landed in the fall of 2008, in the same period that Cohee and his colleagues at the bank were in contact with Waters and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass.) to secure tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to keep it afloat. About $51 million of the bank's stock in federally chartered lending agencies had become virtually worthless, leaving it with a shortage of capital.

OneUnited's loss was also a loss for Waters's husband, Sidney Williams, a former board member of the bank whose stock in it had plummeted in value from about $350,000 to $170,000. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, the couple had earned a total of more than $35,000 in dividends from Williams's OneUnited stock. Cohee and other bank officers had also contributed at least $11,000 to her campaign and organized a fundraiser for her at one of his homes.

In December 2008, after Frank inserted language in legislation he said was meant to benefit OneUnited and similar banks, the bank received a $12 million grant from the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP), created to encourage lending by healthy, viable banks. A report released this week by a congressional ethics committee said that without that grant and some new private investment, Waters's husband's financial interest in OneUnited "would have been worthless" -- a contention that Waters's attorneys dispute.

Waters's decision to arrange a September meeting, requested by Cohee, with Treasury Department officials at which the bank appealed for federal money is at the heart of allegations that she violated House rules, a charge she vehemently denies. Waters acknowledges setting up the meeting with Cohee, who is African American, but says it was on behalf of minority-owned banks in general.

Read the rest here.

An interesting post on a really boring topic

OK. Let's be honest. In the grand scheme of Orthoblogdom the topic of church administration, (unless we are talking about a scandal) is about as exciting as watching a championship chess match on payperview. And if we are talking about the much discussed Episcopal Assembly and a potential future American Orthodox Church (AOC) we would all much rather expound on why America is not mature and ready for it's own church. And why it's better that we remain under ethnic churches until we get a better grasp of real Orthodoxy and purge all of the Protestant baggage from recent converts. Never mind that as long as we are taking converts that will be a never ending battle (presuming the problem is in fact as bad as some claim). And of course totally ignoring the fact that our current ecclesiological structure here is absolutely non-canonical and that the state of the Orthodox Church in N. America is and will perpetually be one of open scandal until we put an end to the multiplicity of jurisdictions here.

But I digress.

A really important but deathly boring topic relevant to any future AOC is church administration. I am talking about the nuts and bolts of making it work. Yea yea yea, I know. Can't we just get on with a fun debate about how Catholics are really heretics and just how far the Anglicans have fallen? But this is actually an important topic. So bear with me please.

There is a new website (blog?) up called Suggestions For the Episcopal Assembly. (Hat Tip: Byzantine Texas) It's not really clear who is running it other than that it is not an official site. But I like the concept. It is a venue for constructive suggestions on how to get a future AOC up and running. The EA hopes to present some sort of viable plan to sort out our jurisdictional chaos for the consideration of the Great and Holy Synod that has been on the drawing boards for about a century now.

Which brings me to the very first post. And it is an impressive one at that. The author presents a fairly detailed suggestion for how we can carve up the United States (sans Canada) into Eparchs with each one containing multiple dioceses. He suggests that the Eparchs roughly correspond to the ten Administrative Regions used by the Federal Government. You can read the details of his (or her) suggestion here.

Are there some issues? Yes of course. But after reading the suggestion several times, I think the author has actually come up with a plan that could serve as the basis or framework if you will, for organizing the AOC into viable dioceses and lay the groundwork for a national Holy Synod.

Please leave your comments on the original post.

Going out in a blaze of glory

Yesterday I posted a little news item from the NY Times about an airline attendant who had a run in with a really obnoxious jerk on his plane and had what I referred to as an "I've had enough and I'm not taking it anymore!" moment. After the short excerpt with the obligatory link to the rest of the story, I admitted to feeling some sympathy for the man and guessed that I might not be the only one who smiled a little while reading it. I was wrong.

As by now probably everyone in the country has heard, Mr. Steven Slater, (formerly?) of Jet Blue Airlines, was cursed and struck (accidentally?) by a passenger as yet unnamed who felt he was special so he could stand up and get his carry on luggage while everyone else had to sit and wait until the plane finished taxiing. The long and the short of it is that Mr. Slater decided after being cursed and struck that just maybe the customer is not always right, and that it was time for a career change. So he got on the PA system and announced his resignation to his co-workers and passengers with a very personal message thrown in for the benefit of the special gentlemen already alluded to. After which he then grabbed his own carry on bag, helped himself to a couple of beers from the beverage cart (probably the only severance package he could expect), popped the hatch, activated the emergency evacuation slide and executed one of the most glorious acts of professional seppuku in recent memory.

As I said above; I was wrong. Reaction to this, at the time rather small story in the Times, was not limited to a few sympathetic grins. Mr. Slater has overnight become a national folk hero. He has become the embodiment of that great American song from the early 80's "Take this job and shove it!" Online blogs and bulletin boards on major news services and papers have been flooded with "Atta boy!" comments. People from Maine to Hawaii are posting their own stories of on the job frustration and in some cases, of that moment when they too snapped and told their boss exactly where, with anatomical precision, they could stick their job.

At this rate Mr. Slater's could be the next face on Mt. Rushmore, except for a few small details.

First, he has been arrested and charged with a couple of felonies. In theory he could spend up to seven years in the clink. In reality I suspect the Queens County DA is already pondering where in a county of several millions of people he is going to find twelve who would convict Steven Slater of jaywalking. My guess is this will be plea bargained as fast as it can be arranged while saving face.

Another problem, and one that kinda bothers me a bit, is the manner of his exit. No, I'm not talking about his decision to very publicly quit without notice or even his telling off the south end of a north bound mule for whom rules are optional. If it stopped there I'd probably buy him a beer were we ever to meet. I am talking about his decision to deploy a one time use only piece of emergency equipment that costs about $100k as the instrument for his grand exit. I don't care how bad your day was, or how mistreated you feel by your employer. You don't get to destroy or expropriate company property on your way out the door. (I'm inclined to overlook the beers.) So yea, that is probably the number one issue that keeps me from enshrining Mr. Slater in the pantheon of truly great Americans.

All of which said, as I noted yesterday I am still sympathetic. I won't bore you with my own "I've had enough and I'm not taking it anymore!" story. Suffice to say I actually do have one. But it's no wheres near in the same league as Mr. Slater's (I didn't even get canned). My guess is we have all had moments where we either snapped or only held back by a truly supreme effort from throttling someone in desperate need of a little oxygen deprivation.

So here's to you Steven Slater, a hearty 2 and a half cheers! Just next time, don't take or damage anything that doesn't belong to you on your way out.

Federal Salaries Soaring Above Private Sector

For those fortunate enough to have a job in this tough economy, there's a growing gap in salary between government employees and those who work for private companies.

While many Americans have suffered pay cuts or job losses, one group is bucking the trend: federal workers, CBS News Investigative Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports. A USA Today analysis finds that federal employees have gotten bigger pay and benefit increases than private employees for nine years straight.

"It made me think, man, I should be a federal employee," one woman said on the streets of the capital.

Federal salaries have grown 33 percent faster than inflation. Their pay and benefits averaged $123,049 in 2009, up 36.9 percent since 2000. Private workers averaged $61,051, up just 8.8 percent during the same time.

Read the rest here.

Fearing an economic slowdown and deflation the FED will print (more) money

WASHINGTON — Acknowledging that the recovery has slowed, the Federal Reserve on Tuesday announced that it would use the proceeds from its huge mortgage-bond portfolio to buy long-term Treasury securities.

By buying government debt, the Fed is taking an unmistakable step to maintain the large amount of money that it pumped into the economy, starting in 2007, to prop up the financial and housing markets.

The Fed bought $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities, and another $200 billion in debts owed by government-sponsored enterprises, primarily Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and completed the purchases in March. The Fed had planned to allow the size of that portfolio to shrink gradually over time as the debts matured or were prepaid. Instead, the Fed will reinvest the principal payments in longer-term Treasury securities.

The central bank said it would continue to roll over its holdings of other Treasury securities as they mature.

In its announcement, the Fed also left unchanged its benchmark short-term interest rate — the federal funds rate, the rate at which banks borrow from each other overnight — at zero to 0.25 percent, the level it has been at since December 2008.

In a new qualification to its previous statements, the committee said it still expected a “gradual return” to normal economic conditions, “although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.”

On Wall Street, shares regained some lost ground after the announcement.

Read the rest here.

EU presses for power of direct taxation

The EU hopes that the plan, to be unveiled next month, which could see new taxes on air travel and financial transactions, will give it more independence and fund controversial expansion proposals.

The direct taxes would reduce each country's annual payment to the EU.

The proposal has sparked fierce reaction from Britain the Treasury has said it would veto any proposal, which would lead to the loss of the budget rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher.

Lord Sassoon, the Commercial Secretary, said the Treasury would block any plans. “The Government is opposed to direct taxes financing the EU budget,” he said. “The UK believes that taxation is a matter for Member States to determine at a national level and would have a veto over any plans for such taxes."

Read the rest here.

Quote of the day...

It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss... except the inventor of the telephone.

-Mark Twain

Tough day on the job (and probably last)

A JetBlue flight attendant apparently upset with an uncooperative passenger on a just-landed flight unleashed a profanity-laden tirade on the public-address system, pulled the emergency-exit chute, slid off the plane and fled Kennedy International Airport, a law enforcement official said.

The dramatic getaway was short-lived. The attendant, Steven Slater, 39, was arrested at his home not far away in Belle Harbor, Queens. He was charged with reckless endangerment and criminal mischief.

The contretemps unfolded as JetBlue flight 1052 from Pittsburgh landed at Kennedy around noon — on time — with a full load of 100 passengers and pulled up to the gate, said the law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was continuing but offered the following account:

One passenger got out of his seat to fetch his belongings from the overhead compartment before the crew had given permission. Mr. Slater instructed the man to remain seated. The passenger defied him. Mr. Slater approached and reached the passenger just as he pulled down his luggage, which struck Mr. Slater in the head.

Mr. Slater asked for an apology. The passenger instead cursed at him. Mr. Slater got on the plane’s public address system and cursed out all aboard. Then he activated the inflatable evacuation slide at service exit R1, launched himself off the plane, ran to the employee parking lot and left the airport in a car he had parked there.

Read the rest here.

Ever had an "I've had enough and I'm not taking it any more!" moment? I have. Now I'm not gonna pretend that what he did was right. It wasn't. But I am pretty sure I'm not the only one who smiled just a little while reading this. Here's hoping someone offers the poor guy a new job.

100 Years Ago Today: A famous photo...

Taken moments after New York City Mayor William Jay Gaynor was shot by a recently fired civil servant. The Mayor was on the deck of the ocean liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse preparing to depart on a European vacation when the unhinged former city employee tried to return the favor to the mayor. The mayor survived, though he never fully recovered.

In one of those eerie but fascinating coincidences of history the man directly behind the mayor was Robert Lincoln, the only son of the assassinated President to live to adulthood. Robert Lincoln declined his father's invitation to join him at Ford's Theater on the fateful night. He would later be in the immediate proximity when President Garfield was shot by an assassin in 1881 (he died some months later) and again when President William McKinley was fatally wounded in Buffalo NY in 1901.

Not the sort of man I would want standing near me in a lightning storm.

You can read the background on Mayor Gaynor and his brush with death here. He was a rather remarkable figure in New York politics for that era.

Britain Begins to Feel Austerity Cuts

LONDON — Last month, the British government abolished the U.K. Film Council, the Health Protection Agency and dozens of other groups that regulate, advise and distribute money in the arts, health care, industry and other areas.

It seemed shockingly abrupt, a mass execution without appeal. But it was just a tiny taste of what was to come.

Like a shipwrecked sailor on a starvation diet, the new British coalition government is preparing to shrink down to its bare bones as it cuts expenditures by $130 billion over the next five years and drastically scales back its responsibilities. The result, said the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a research group, will be “the longest, deepest sustained period of cuts to public services spending” since World War II.

Until recently, the cuts were just election talking points, early warnings of a new age of austerity. But now the pain has begun. And as the government begins its abrupt retrenchment, the implications, complications and confusions in the process are beginning to emerge.

“It feels like they’re just sticking a finger in the air and guessing,” John Mutton, leader of the City Council in Coventry, said of the government’s methods for deciding which programs to cancel and which to cut.

In June, the government announced its first round of cuts, removing about $10 billion from the current year’s budget.

While that is a drop in the bucket compared to the final goal, the reduction measures have already had severe consequences. Public sector workers across the country, except for the lowest paid, will have their salaries frozen for the next two years. Oxfordshire, facing a nearly $1 million trim in its road safety budget, has been forced to shut down all its 161 traffic speed cameras.

The cuts mean that Nottinghamshire plans to close three recycling facilities and some of its day care centers. And that the city of Coventry, which already cut spending in January, is trying to find $5.6 million more to cut from its current child services budget.

But none of this is much compared to what the country will face when the government issues its long-term budget plans in October. Mr. Mutton, the Coventry official, predicted that the next round of cuts would cost the city at least 10,000 jobs in the public and private sectors. Analysts have estimated that some 600,000 public-sector jobs could be lost nationwide.

Read the rest here.

The Papacy - The Patriarchy of the West- and Orthodox Ecclesiology

I draw the reader's attention to a fascinating com-box discussion going on over at Fr. Z's blog (see this post) on the Papal decision to drop the title Patriarch of the West and its implications in ecumenical relations. It also moves into an interesting discussion of Catholic and Orthodox ecclesiology and approaches to Primacy.

Long time readers of this blog will recall that while I staunchly reject the ultra-montanist (and IMO heretical) claims of the First Vatican Council, I have also repeatedly opined that Orthodoxy has a somewhat underdeveloped concept of primacy. It is a subject that too many Orthodox get nervous about because anytime someone suggests that there is more to it (primacy) than sitting at the head of the table or being the first bishop in the procession, one is instantly accused of being a crypto-papist. Such knee jerk fears aside however, clearly primacy does indeed amount to more than the eccelsiological equivalent to the status of the Queen of Denmark. The Patriarch of Constantinople should be, and IMO is, more than just the head we would put on Orthodox postage stamps. (And I say this as someone who has occasionally been sharply critical of H.A.H.)

I particularly commend this comment by PaterAugustinus as one worth serious attention. It contains a host of interesting points, some of which I am not altogether comfortable with. But that comment alone could be the subject of a really fascinating debate. In any event a serious discussion about primacy and its role in Orthodox ecclesiology is long overdue. I wonder if perhaps that is not something that should be added to the agenda of a certain Great and Holy Synod that has been much rumored and imminently forthcoming for nigh on a century.

British couple murdered in "honor killing"

Gul Wazir, a taxi driver from Birmingham’s Alum Rock and wife Begum were shot dead Salehana, a village known as "Little England" for its high number of migrants to Britain, on Monday last week.

The news of their murders was not reported because of disruption caused by floods in the area

Their son was also wounded in the incident but survived.

The couple had travelled to the village from Britain after their daughter told them she wanted to call off the wedding plans because she didn’t want to marry a man from Pakistan.

"The husband and wife had already promised their daughter to a man. When that arrangement ended he was not happy," a friend of the family said.

“Gul and his wife went to Pakistan to try to sort it out, but this man went crazy and shot them for breaking off the engagement. This is a tragedy. They were honest, decent people."

Read the rest here.

When less is more

A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.

Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”

So one day she stepped off.

Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.

Her mother called her crazy.

Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.

Read the rest here.

Draught Fire and Pollution hammer Russia

MOSCOW — Planes were diverted from Moscow airports on Friday after huge peat and forest fires blanketed the capital in acrid smoke, forcing some businesses to close and office workers to wear surgical masks at their desks.

Pollution surged to five times normal levels in the city of 10.5 million, the highest sustained contamination since Russia's worst heat wave in more than a century began a month ago. Officials urged Muscovites to not venture outdoors.

"Looking at the overall duration (of the pollution), today's smoke level is the worst yet," said Alexei Popikov, an expert on air quality at Moscow's state-run pollution monitoring agency.

Read the rest here.

Feast of the Transfiguration and slow posting (again)

(OK. So I can't read a calendar.) Sorry for the slow posting this week. I just moved and it's been a busy week. Also I will be out of town for the next couple of days. Although I will be bringing my computer I don't expect much posting before Monday. I wish everyone a blessed feast of the Transfiguration and a pleasant weekend.

Heroic Missionaries strive to evangelize... Greece

The bravery and courage of ancient Spartans is legendary. The name conjures up visions of fearless soldiers charging into battle without thought of life or limb. The word spartan has even crept into the English language to describe the conditions that are at the opposite extreme from comfortable and luxurious.

For the past week Sparta has been the epicentre of a missionary outreach that has reached and touched thousands of homes as a team of 180 from countries as diverse as Canada, Romania, Italy, South Africa, Germany, Holland, the USA and Albania.

In all 60,000 households received a copy of the New Testament in contemporary Greek as part of a project called Operation Joshua. One participant described it as a "Tsunami of blessing" as energetic teams using some 50 cars, criss-crossing the sparse and mountainous region. They have gone to over 800 villages in some of the remotest areas of Greece bringing the message of life.

How does this project compare with other evangelistic efforts? In a word, "historic". In a country where there are less than 20,000 people are recognised as evangelical believers this was truly a significant event. This is a country that has never had a reformation or a revival. It has never held any mass evangelistic campaigns.

Read the rest here.

RIP: Mitch Miller

A class act all the way, Mitch Miller died on Saturday at 99. I honestly did not know he was still alive all these years.

Mitch Miller was the guy who showed everybody how to be a producer," said Tony Bennett—probably the greatest of the late musician-producer-conductor's "discoveries"—in 1989. Speaking metaphorically, Mr. Bennett elaborated: "When Mitch had a cigar and a beard, everybody else had to have a cigar and a beard."

The roles played by Miller, who died Saturday at age 99, were many: As a woodwind player and conductor, he collaborated with George Gershwin, Charlie Parker, Igor Stravinsky, Leopold Stokowski and Frank Sinatra. As a pop star in his own right, he became the face of the sing-along craze of the early '60s through a series of bestselling albums and a long-running TV series.

Read the rest here.

Relics of St. John the Baptist are claimed found

The remains – small fragments of a skull, bones from a jaw and an arm, and a tooth – were discovered embedded in an altar in the ruins of the ancient monastery, on the island in the Black Sea.

A Greek inscription on the stone casque contains a reference to June 24 – the date on which John the Baptist is believed to have been born.

"We found the relics of St John the Baptist - exactly what the archaeologists had expected," said Bozhidar Dimitrov, Bulgaria's minister without portfolio and a former director of the country's National History Museum, who was present when the stone urn was opened.

"It has been confirmed that these are parts of his skeleton."

Exactly how the relics ended up on the island is a mystery, but Mr Dimitrov said they may have been donated by the Christian Church in Constantinople when Bulgaria was part of the Byzantine Empire.

But other experts cast doubt on the claim, saying carbon dating tests were needed before the bones could be identified as belonging to Christ's baptiser.

Read the rest here.

40 billionaires pledge to give away half of wealth

A little over a year after Bill Gates and Warren Buffett began hatching a plan over dinner to persuade America's wealthiest people to give most of their fortunes to charity, more than three-dozen individuals and families have agreed to take part, campaign organizers announced Wednesday.

In addition to Buffett and Gates — America's two wealthiest individuals, with a combined net worth of $90 billion, according to Forbes — 38 other billionaires have signed The Giving Pledge. They include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, entertainment executive Barry Diller, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, energy tycoon T. Boone Pickens, media mogul Ted Turner, David Rockefeller, film director George Lucas and investor Ronald Perelman.

"We're off to a terrific start," Buffett, co-founder and chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, said in a conference call also attended by Bloomberg and San Francisco hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer and his wife Kat Taylor, founder of OneCalifornia Bank.

Read the rest here.

Eternal Memory: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
December 11 1918-August 3 2008

A Pack of Misogynistic Male Chauvinists In Action

The Economic Heresy of the Neo-Cons and the Republican Party

David Stockman (Reagan's old budget director) writes a damning indictment of the modern GOP and its embrace of the Keynesian free lunch. It's not the tax and spend liberals that keep me awake at night. It's the borrow and spend neo-cons who scare the #$%@ out of me. This country is in deep trouble.

IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase.

More fundamentally, Mr. McConnell’s stand puts the lie to the Republican pretense that its new monetarist and supply-side doctrines are rooted in its traditional financial philosophy. Republicans used to believe that prosperity depended upon the regular balancing of accounts — in government, in international trade, on the ledgers of central banks and in the financial affairs of private households and businesses, too. But the new catechism, as practiced by Republican policymakers for decades now, has amounted to little more than money printing and deficit finance — vulgar Keynesianism robed in the ideological vestments of the prosperous classes.

This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

Read the rest here.

Hat Tip: T-19